


The Sounds of Then

by cherryburlesque



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Character Study, Desert Keith Week 2018, Flashbacks, Gen, M/M, Not really but keith is reminiscing about prekerb so i guess???, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Pre-Canon, Pre-Kerberos Mission, SHEITH - Freeform, Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-01 06:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15137597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryburlesque/pseuds/cherryburlesque
Summary: The Garrison is behind him, along with all of his hopes and dreams, keeping with it his shattered heart. Ahead of him lies nothing but two hundred square miles of a barren wasteland, a dirty old shack, and survival.Maybe he’s going a little mad, but without anyone around to tell him otherwise, he can’t quite say for sure. All he knows is that throwing himself into making some kind of survivable life out here softens the deep wound in his heart that likes to smart and burn in the night, and the sense of accomplishment in repairing the old shack eases the bone deep loneliness that’s hung over him like a shroud since he left the Garrison.The little dandelion watches his half-crazed repairs all the while, as indifferent to it all as it is the mouldy old foam mattress it’s taken root in.





	1. Provisions.

**Author's Note:**

> My contribution to Desert Keith Week 2018! I've been looking forward to this since it was announced. I hope you enjoy it!

In hindsight, taking off into the arid, unforgiving desert on grief-stricken impulse with nothing but the clothes on his back and a bag stuffed with the contents of his bedside drawer probably wasn’t the smartest decision Keith’s ever made. But then, he never had been one for smart decisions, and it was only a collection of happy accidents and dumb ideology that had brought him to this point in the first place—to the Garrison where he had finally begun to hope for a future and grow into a human worth something, where he was never just another number to the one person who mattered. Where he’d begun to find his own feet among strangers, and dream of the stars that seemed only just out of his reach for no other reason than that he wasn’t yet old enough to grab hold of them in his fists.

The happy accidents have run out though, and now he’s driving at a hundred and twenty miles an hour across the parched landscape, ignoring the burn in his eyes as a product of the searing wind while he tries to escape anything and everything that might remind him of the dreams he’s left shattered in his wake.

He knows where he’s going, despite his lack of preparation. He knows this landscape well; being removed from the desert after his father’s death has never managed to remove the instinct from his bones, and Keith speeds across the scrubby, barren wasteland with purpose, ignoring the rational part of his brain that tells him to _just go back, just turn around_.

There’s no turning around now. There’s nothing back there for him anymore.

 

All that’s left of his childhood home is the ramshackle little shed that used to house the hoverbike. Keith remembers lingering out there after his father returned from dousing grassfires, watching him lovingly clean the fuselage of soot and dirt. After their home had gone up in flames when Keith was five, his father had converted it into a little lean-to that was enough for both of them to live in comfortably.

He hasn’t been back here since he learned his father was never coming home.

It’s still standing, which is a surprise in and of itself. Keith sits out the front for a solid fifteen minutes, just staring at the building, wondering whether he has the courage to go inside.  He can’t pretend the burn in his eyes is from the wind anymore.

He ventures in, eventually. Because he’s baking outside, and he has nowhere else to go.

_Nowhere else to go._

The first thing he does is wander through the place in a kind of dissociative daze. The futon his dad used to sleep on is holey and covered in years’ worth of desert dust, but the blanket is still strewn over the back of it like he’d only left there yesterday. The bookshelf still has a few bits and pieces on it, and the old stereo setup is still right where it had been the day Keith was taken away. His little bed on the sleep-out is a rusted, twisted mess, the mattress long since lost to ravenous desert beasts who mistook the lumpy mess as a meal. In one corner of the mattresses remains is a single, stubborn little plant sprouting from the foam, a fat yellow dandelion flower pointing cheerfully at the sun.  Keith feels a lump in his throat when he stares at it for too long.

Stubborn and solitary. Like coyotes. Like Keith.

He leaves the dandelion and heads back inside.

The walls are peeling, and everything is covered in dirt and dust, but it’s home.

It’s home now.

Keith sinks down onto the futon and ignores the cloud of dust that rises around him. His breath is stuck in his throat and he can barely breathe. Being back here carries so much weight and memory, and coupled with his grief from Shiro’s loss…

He’ll deal with it.

That little dandelion has managed to survive in nothing but mouldy mattress foam for who knows how long. Keith will survive in nothing but his own despair if he has to.

Shiro wouldn’t want him to give up. Keith can practically hear him whispering in his ear, telling him to just keep going a little while longer and it will all be worth it. Just keep pushing through, keep surviving, like the desert flower, and he’ll be okay.

He’ll be okay.

 

It takes him all of three hours to regather himself after allowing one small breakdown when he finds his father’s old uniform. It’s another hurt on top of all the others that pushes Keith over the edge, and like a failing levee the floodwaters are released. He curls up on the floor of the dirty, dusty shack and loses himself to his grief, letting it all loose in one gut wrenching swoop that he hopes will tide him over for a little while, so that he can think logically again once he’s gotten it out of his system.

The dirt is caked to the side of his face by the time he pulls himself back up.

That’s enough self indulgence for now, he tells himself. He won’t survive out here if he spends it curled up on the foetal position clutching his dads vest. There are things he needs to do, and provisions he needs to collect, and they won’t collect themselves while he’s lying on the floor wasting water by sobbing.

The first thing he does is make a list of the things he will need. The generator for the shack is fucked, and it’ll be no good getting food or water if he can’t keep them, so parts for it, while not necessarily the most urgent, are the first to land on the list. Other necessities follow swiftly; water, long life food, ammunition, fuel. Soap and toiletries. Flint, matches and firewood.

Most of that he thinks he can get in the town shy of an hour away, and the rest from the shack itself or the surrounding desert. His major roadblock is money.

Keith has never had much money to his name anyway, and he certainly hadn’t thought to grab any when he’d fled the Garrison, so he’s stuck staring around the shack wondering what he can pawn off, and his eyes settle on the stereo set in the corner.

His dad used to listen to all sorts of things Keith never understood on that thing. It’s old, and probably doesn’t work anymore, but he thinks he can sell the less important parts of it (who needs a two-way in the middle of nowhere?) for a few bucks to get what he wants.

Decision made, Keith proceeds to take apart some of the components of the stereo, and bundles it up in an old sheet to take with him into town.

 

The first thing Keith buys with the fifty bucks he’d made off the two-way is water. Later, he’ll rejig the old bore his dad had built so that it will function properly again, but right now he has nothing but a few mouthfuls left in his canteen, and he won’t survive another day without any more.

Five two gallon plastic bottles are loaded up onto the back of his bike; one to ration until he can restart the boar, and four to keep as an emergency supply. No one really spares him a second glance when it comes to his water-hoarding. It’s common enough out here that they probably assume he’s just being cautious, and he doesn’t particularly care anyway.

The next thing on his list is food. That’s easy enough; canned vegetables are about fifteen cents apiece, and it doesn’t cost him too much to buy a good month or two’s worth. It’ll keep him going until he can figure out a way to make money in the future, at any rate.

It’s on a whim that he buys a few hardy seeds and some fertiliser from the gardening aisle. A good one, he thinks; because he can grow vegetables himself and have some proper, fresh food rather than living off canned shit for god knows how long.

Longevity isn’t something he’s really thought about so far. It’s not something he’s ready to face just yet.

Cheap toiletries, flint, matches, fuel and ammo all follow the food and water into the back of the bike, which is seriously beginning to groan with the extra weight. He’d been hoping to go hunting for parts for the generator, but he’s run out of money already with what he has and honestly, electricity isn’t on his list of priorities right now. That’s a luxury he can’t afford at this point, and with the day beginning to wane, he needs to get back to the shack and start fixing the bore.

 

It turns out Keith doesn’t get a chance to start on the bore until the next day.

By the time he’d gotten the supplies back to the shack and somewhat organised, the sun was gone and it was too cold for him to be out in the open for too long without protection. So he’d instead focused on building a fire-pit; one large enough to burn for hours on its own, and had cleaned the old hunting rifle his dad had kept by its light. The wood fuelling it had been the remains of the old fence that once surrounded the homestead—a temporary fix until Keith can head out looking for real firewood.

He sleeps inside on the dirty futon, shivering under the filthy blanket but too wary of wild animals to stay out by the fire.

When the sun rises, Keith rises with it, and he takes the bike out to the bore some half a mile away. It’s a simple enough structure, little more than piping buried deep beneath the earth into the water table, with a small pump at ground level to control the flow. It was connected to the main homestead once, providing them with running water for showering and cleaning, but the old plumbing has likely been severed and the pump is covered with layers of dirt and grime.  With any luck it will still work with only a few minor repairs to the pump, and Keith won’t have to subject himself to days and days worth of digging a new bore.

Luck, for once, is on his side.

Three hours, one bad sunburn and a few skinned knuckles later, Keith is able to twist the pump and wash his face for the first time in what feels like ever under the cascade of cold, fresh water that spills forth. It soothes his dry eyes and chapped lips, and he quickly fills up the half empty water bottle he’d brought with him before turning the flow off and sighing deep and bone weary.

He now has access to an almost limitless supply of water. It’s a huge relief, particularly when he squeezes the cold excess from his t-shirt over his burned shoulders.

_Should have thought of sunscreen._

Oh well. Next trip into town, he’ll pawn off his watch and get himself some SPF50+.

 

The repair of the bore doesn’t give Keith time to pause. Now that he _has_ water, he intends to use it wisely, and right now his body is telling him that _wisely_ means cleaning the shack from top to bottom so that he isn’t constantly aspirating on dust.

It’s almost feverish, the way he scrubs. He spends the entire day in the main room, running over everything with a wet cloth that he dunks in increasingly dirty water. The futon is dragged outside and its frame wiped down, mattress beat within an inch of its life to remove the dust. The cinderblocks and slab of the coffee table are scrubbed over, the old chipped coffee cup left there thrown out the back to be used in some other sustainable manner. Even the silent electrical equipment gets a once over, until it’s all dragged outside leaving the main room bare and sad-looking.

Keith changes the water in the bucket, and continues in his  scrubbing. The peeling walls, the ceiling, the window panes, the floor. The light fixture without a globe, the sills and glass. He scrubs and scrubs, ignoring the way his body is tiring in favour of making this place inhabitable again, and knowing that when he stops he’ll be left with his thoughts again—something he doesn’t want to do just yet.

It’s dark and cold and the fire is built high again when Keith finally drags the furniture back inside. Nothing has been left untouched, and if he had detergent or something of the like, he’s pretty sure the place would be literally sparkling.

The nuns in the home would never have believed their eyes if they could see him now.

 

The dandelion flower is the only thing that survives the cleaning frenzy.

Over the following days, Keith works his way through the rest of the shack. Anything he considers trash is put outside to be reused somehow, and anything that’s still in working order is cleaned inside and out and put back somewhere useful.

He eats from the canned food, but he’s managed to collect enough bits and pieces to build a garden bed out by the tree where his swing once hung, and so he considers that his next stop in the to-do list. Eating out of cans isn’t sustainable, and it tastes like shit anyway. He’d much rather spend the money on some gardening soil and build something he can care for.

It gives him something else to focus on.

The garden bed takes another two days. Keith goes back into town and pawns off his watch, buys the sunscreen, some soil mix and fertilisers, as well as long, thin hosing. He must look a little wild, because the guy at the store stares at him like he’s something foreign, but says nothing when Keith grabs the entire purchase in his arms and dumps it back on his bike.

He builds the garden bed out of the remains of his old bedframe. The metal lines the deep, square holes he’s dug, and the whole thing is lined with plastic sheeting that used to cover the hoverbike once upon a time. The soil mix goes in on top, and the hosing snakes its way through it all to be connected to the bore in a self-irrigating system that Keith is more than a little proud of himself for creating.

The seeds are planted with the care and devotion of someone tending to an infant.

 

Maybe he’s going a little mad, but without anyone around to tell him otherwise, he can’t quite say for sure. All he knows is that throwing himself into making some kind of survivable life out here softens the deep wound in his heart that likes to smart and burn in the night, and the sense of accomplishment in repairing the old shack eases the bone deep loneliness that’s hung over him like a shroud since he left the Garrison.

The little dandelion watches his half-crazed repairs all the while, as indifferent to it all as it is the mouldy old foam mattress it’s taken root in.

Maybe Keith should be like the dandelion. Maybe he’ll be less likely to fall apart when night falls if he carries on doing what he needs to do to survive and doesn’t think about the _why_. Why he’s out here repairing his old home; why he’s in the middle of the desert at all. Why he’s no longer following his dream of reaching for the stars and instead cowering away from them under a streaked roof on an uncomfortable futon. Maybe it’ll be easier if the shack is his mouldy old mattress, and he’s the dandelion persevering regardless of the state of his surrounds.

It’s just survival, after all.

 

Two weeks after his arrival, Keith abruptly finds himself with nothing else to do. The place is clean, he’s managed to rig up some kind of working bathroom in the concrete container at the end of the shack, his vegetables are growing and he’s got the generator functioning again. He has food, water, electricity and fire, and for all intents and purposes is now living in a fully functioning house.

He feels emptier now than he did when he first arrived.

His dads belongings have been packed up and carefully stowed, and he’s managed to get the radio working again so that he at least isn’t living in complete silence. But it does nothing to chase away the boredom, nor has it soothed the ache in his heart.

There’s an urge.

An undeniable, irrefutable urge in his chest. To just—go. Keep going. To head out further than he has so far, until he finds _something_. What it is, he doesn’t know, but he can’t sit still here and watch his plants grow and hope that somehow things will change. Not when the dust has settled again and his grief is still as strong a companion as it ever was.

No, there’s miles and miles of desert around him, full of life and mystery. There are things out there that he can find. Make use of.

The dandelion survived by staying obstinately in its one spot, refusing to yield to the world around it. But Keith has never been one to stay still—not when he was a child, and not now. He knows the world will chew him up and spit him out even when he seems to be the only one in it, and so the only way to avoid that fate is to learn as much as he can about it. Become part of the environment.

 _Survive by adapting_.

He could be like the dandelion. Stay here in the shack and wither away to nothing until either his own depression or the desert itself takes his life from his body. Or he can get out there amongst it, like the wild thing the home depot boy thought he was, and become like the desert around him.

Learn. Survive. Adapt.

 

The next day, Keith grabs his loaded rifle, a backpack of provisions and the picture of Shiro and himself before the launch. A coyote howls in the distance, unseen but calling, and Keith grins.

This time when he takes off, it’s not on grief stricken impulse, and it’s not because he’s stubborn like a dandelion. He takes off to find more. To _learn._

To adapt.


	2. Wildlife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four orphans, a lot of sleepless nights, and a new sense of companionship.

When Keith was little, he remembered his father warning him about wandering too far away from the house. _Always stay where I can see you_ , he’d said, _and if you see a wild thing, call out for me. You never know what might happen out here in the wilderness._

He’d seen the wild things his father spoke of when he was young. Cut it a little fine once when he thought he could befriend a fox that had grown curious, and nearly had his fingers bitten off.  He’d been afraid of foxes ever since, though that fear waned as he grew older.

There had been a small pack of coyotes making a den of one of the caves in the cliff face back then. Keith remembers his dad taking him for a look, fingers pressed to his lips as they crawled over a rocky rise to see the puppies rolling around. They’d stayed there for months, until the puppies were old enough to head out on their own, and the den became vacant and empty once more. Keith had entertained the idea of keeping one of the puppies as a pet, but had been warned by his father to keep his distance and never engage them.

Coyotes were beautiful animals. But they were territorial and dangerous, and a six year old boy would make an easy meal for them if he let them.

He learned that for himself, when he had been out in the yard on the swing one morning. Jackrabbits often frequented the area around the house looking for scraps, and he’d spotted one earlier making a steady approach. Keith had paid it no mind at first, not really caring for rodents, but he’d watched it once it had drawn closer while idling on his swing. It was cautious, curious and steady, but apparently decided Keith wasn’t a threat to it, for it began moving closer with more confidence.

It was barely ten feet away when it went still. Keith hadn’t moved, curiosity piqued in the way the rabbit stood tall and then abruptly dropped to its front paws.

And then, so swiftly and silently that Keith hadn’t even realised it was there, a coyote had burst from the scrubby bush and attacked.

The jackrabbit bolted, but even its speed was no match for the canine, who had barely taken six leaps before it was upon it.

Just like that, the jackrabbit was lunch, and Keith was in awe.

He’d grown up fearing foxes, but Keith had loved Coyotes ever since.

 

Out in the open plains, their howls are almost constant. It’s a comforting background noise to the wind through the bushes as Keith explores.

He’s out here more often than ever, recently. Not only does it give him something to do, but it also satiates that infallible urge within him that hasn’t shifted since the day he arrived at his old home. He’d mistaken that urge as one to clean and repair; to make his home liveable again, but it hadn’t ever abated despite practically turning the shack upside down.

Ever since, he’s spent the days wandering the canyons and cliffs, venturing further and further until he ends up camping a night or two because he’s too far away to reach it safely back home before nightfall.

He’s become pretty good at hunting while he’s out here.

His vegetables are thriving. The irrigation he’s provided for the thirstier plants is enough to allow them plenty of growth, and the hardier ones are growing basically without any intervention from him at all. It means Keith is able to eat well, and with his skills in hunting becoming more and more honed as time passes, it’s not very often that he sits down without a solid, hearty meal to eat.

His rifle is slung across his back each time he ventures out, ready and waiting to be used. He’s as opportunistic as the canines he shares the desert with, and not much goes untried if he spots something he can bring down.

Traps are preferred over the rifle though. Mostly because they’re quieter, and he can explore while he’s waiting for some hapless animal to wander by. He’s only ever had to use the gun once, and that was on a fox that had gotten into his vegetable garden. He hadn’t really enjoyed skinning it, and it had been gamey and unpleasant, so he’d left its remains out for the other wild animals to feast on as they saw fit afterwards.

Mostly he went for rabbits, but had managed to trap a deer once that had given him enough meat for days.

It really is amazing, just how _alive_ the desert really is.

 

It’s on one of his half hunt, half exploring ventures that Keith finds the den.

For all that he hears the coyotes, he never really sees them, and never really expects to. They’re sneakier and smarter than foxes, and better camouflaged than even the smaller bush wildlife. So it’s a complete and total accident that he wanders into a crevasse in the cliff face and is greeted by a sharp, warning growl.

Keith is immediately on high alert. His father’s voice runs through his mind, a ghost of a warning instinctively coming to the forefront. _Don’t try to threaten the mother. They’ll attack faster than you can blink. Stay still, keep your eyes on her, and move away slowly._

As his eyes adjust to the gloom, he can make out the distinct form of an adult coyote, curled in a manner that is obvious she’s protecting something. He can’t see _what_ , exactly, but he thinks it’s the right time of year for puppies, and he doesn’t particularly want to go finding out. She’s clearly watching him, though her hackles aren’t raised, and her tail swishes in the dirt and dried plant matter of the cave floor with a silent, warning thump.

“Easy girl,” Keith says in a quiet voice. It’s the first time he thinks he’s spoken in what feels like months, and his voice is hoarser than he expected. “I’m not gonna hurt you. Just gonna back off slowly now, and I’ll leave you alone. Good girl, no harm done, right?”

The coyote is still watching him even as he exits the cave, and Keith takes a few minutes off to the side to settle his pounding heart.

He’s never really been frightened of the wildlife out here. Not since he was scared of foxes as a kid.  But there’s no mistaking the way his hands shake, and the thumping in his chest, or the rapid breathing he’s doing while he stumbles a little further away from the den. That was a shock to his system, and he’s lucky the mother decided to warn him before he could get too much closer.

He doesn’t particularly want to find out what patching up a feral dog bite will entail.

 

Something tells him to go back to the den the next day. It’s that same indescribable urge that has him scouring the desert like a lost child (which he supposes he is), and he can’t resist it even if he knows it’s foolish. In the back of the mind, he feels like he _needs_ to go back there, like he _should_ be checking up on the little canine family, despite the fact that these are wild animals who have been adapting to different climates and habitats for centuries.

If anything, they should be checking up on _him_. He’s the lost kid wandering in the wilderness without any real purpose or meaning, after all.

Still, he heads back to the crevasse where the den was made, loaded rifle slung across his back and some fresh rabbit meat handy just in case. It’s as quiet as ever out here as he approaches, but there’s something wrong. Something very, audibly wrong.

The puppies are crying.

Keith hops over the last few rocky mounds to the den, knowing for certain now that the mother isn’t around. If she was, the puppies wouldn’t be mewling and yowling like they’re calling for something—like they’re starving and crying for a feed.

She’s already dead when he finds her just outside the den.

Her fur is still warm so it can’t be very long. Snake bite, probably, Keith thinks almost clinically. He can’t see one openly, but there aren’t any poachers out here, and he can’t think of any other reason why a wild animal like her would just keel over. There’s no evidence of a fight with another animal her size either, so unless she was already ill for some reason…

Tentatively, Keith runs his fingers through the scrappy fur on the back of her neck. He’s seen dead coyotes before, but it’s always sad to him when he comes across them. This is made worse given the fact that he knows she had a litter, who are now left without a mother to raise them.

Even if the sire does come back, there is no doubt those puppies are doomed.

Keith swallows, and glances into the den where he can dimly see the big-eared, clumsy little things rolling over each other while they bawl. Three of them, still fluffy and tiny, so they can’t be very old—a few weeks at most. Not old enough to survive without their mother.

He glances back down at the dead coyote, and then at his bike. Back to the puppies, and to his bike again.

 

 The puppies aren’t exactly easy to carry across the desert while he’s trying to control the hoverbike. He hasn’t prepared for suddenly gaining three offspring, so he’s stuck with them bundled up in his t-shirt on his lap while he steers haphazardly with one hand, driving far slower than usual back to the shack. The puppies squirm and whine, but he doesn’t have anything else he can do for them right now besides get them back to the shack so he can feed them and hopefully figure out some kind of plan.

His dad had never taught him anything about raising orphaned wildlife, and he’s certainly never gone looking before. So when he gets back to the shack, he deposits them on the futon and watches them in a kind of bewildered daze, scratching the back of his neck while he contemplates what to do next.

 He doesn’t think they’re old enough yet to eat solids, judging by their tiny little teeth, so he goes for the long-life milk he keeps stored in the pantry. A quick sniff once he’s broken the seal tells him it’s still good, and he grabs a bowl to dump the milk into. It will have to do for now, until he can get some more information.

The puppies don’t take to it.

They’re still bawling and yipping amongst each other, but they’re not interested in the bowl of room-temperature milk, and Keith winces when he considers roughly how long they could have gone without food. If their mother was killed right after he saw her, then that means at least twenty hours have passed since they were fed. Which means they won’t last much longer if he doesn’t figure out a way to get them to at least take _something_.

It takes some trial and error, but eventually they start taking the milk off a teaspoon. It’s not the best method, but it’s a start. Keith can deal with that.

He makes a fast trip into town to the library to find a book on raising puppies. It’s for domesticated dogs, but he figures it will do because he has nothing else to go on, and the people here already believe he’s some kind of wild thing; he doesn’t particularly want them to think he’s breeding coyotes as well, even if it has no bearing on his life.

By the books standards, he estimates the puppies at around three weeks old. Which means they’ll need hand feeding for a little while yet. And he’ll need the supplies to do it.

It turns into a rather costly little venture that only the good graces of the little old lady at the grocery store gets him through. He thinks she recognises him from when he was small, but she never says anything and more than once he’s found a few extras in his shopping that he doesn’t recall purchasing. This time, she sees the collection of milk substitutes, tiny bottles, puppy food and bedding, and runs it all through at a much cheaper rate than Keith is sure it’s worth.  He’s not about to question it though—he’s already been away for too long, so he thanks her and grabs his purchases, dumping them on the bike and speeding his way back to the shack.

 

It turns out, hand rearing puppies is a much more arduous task than Keith had anticipated.

Hand rearing _wild_ puppies is damn near impossible.

They refuse the puppy milk at first, clearly not liking the bottle he’s using to feed them. Hunger gives way though and they eventually take it, and Keith spends an hour out of every four feeding the three of them. The other three are spent sterilising the water to make up the formula, cleaning their mess (they’d only peed once on his futon before they were permanently banished to the floor), and keeping them entertained while they’re awake.

At least they don’t wander too far from the little puppy bed he’d bought them. Like an artificial den, he supposes.

He loses sleep, waking up during the night like clockwork to groggily feed the yowling little mutts, and put them outside for ten minutes after feeding to make sure they do their business. He wakes up one morning to find they’ve chewed up the corner of the puppy book he’d borrowed from the library, and decides it’s time for them to start eating semi-solids.

It’s funny how quickly he becomes attached to them. Three little orphaned puppies and their orphaned human, all just doing their best to survive out in a harsh world that would have seen them die if they weren’t resilient as hell. As resilient and adaptable as each other.

Their company, although exhausting, is welcome. They give Keith a purpose and a distraction, and they stop him from sinking too deeply into sleep that nightmares begin to plague him. They keep him from fretting about his own future, and they offer him something to focus on when his grief and loss threaten him in moments of weakness. Strangely, he thinks he was _meant_ to find these scrappy little creatures, like they were _meant_ to find him, and though they’ve lost their mother, Keith likes to think they’ve found love and companionship in him the same way they might have with her.

 

When their personalities begin to show, Keith decides to give them names. The one with the dusky patch on her side is Nudge, after the way she likes to get his attention by butting her head against his leg. The one with a darker tipped tail than the others is Leto, after the way she likes to pounce on her siblings like she’s the boss of them. The sole boy of the trio, a little more mischievous than his sisters, and prone to messing with anything he can get his teeth into, is Puck.

They roll about and play fight with each other, rough and noisy, and as they grow Keith is able to play with them. By the time they’re about ten weeks old, they’re wandering around the shack on their own like they own the place, chasing Keith to the vegetable garden, and curling up by his feet when he sits out by the bonfire at night.

At twelve weeks, they know not to pee inside anymore, and are venturing a little further away from the shack. They come when called, and they pretend to hunt the lizards that like to sun themselves on the rocks during the day. Puck drags Keith’s socks out of his pile of clothes and chews the heel out of them so that he has to start putting them up, and Leto muscles her way into Keith’s lap when he’s sitting on the porch watching the stars.

For all the mess it is, it’s like a new little family.

 

He knows that one day they’ll probably leave. Find their mates, build their own dens, begin making their own way in the world. They’re still wild, after all, even if he can’t teach them everything that their parents could have. But for now, their companionship is cherished. For now, he will relish the play fights and the bites on his ankles, and the chewed up books and the hole in his futon. They fill a void in his chest that’s been scabbed over since he lost Shiro, and he thinks to himself that Shiro would probably find it hilarious that Keith has managed to raise three wild puppies on his own.

His dad would just smile and shake his head, and say that even as a kid Keith had a penchant for finding wild things to bring home.

Keith thinks about those things, and smiles to himself.

He’s still not perfect. Not by a long shot. He’s not healed, but the suffocating depression that’s followed him for what feels like months now has abated a little, now that he has three little ferals who genuinely need him.

They might leave him one day. But as Keith sits by the fire, Nudge and Puck at his feet and Leto on his lap, all of them snoring in the most adorable puppy-like way, he’s pretty sure that he’s okay with that. At least he’ll be prepared this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can pry Keith taming wild animals from my cold, dead fingers.  
> I spent way too much time researching coyotes and hand rearing rules for this lmfao.  
> Comments and kudos give me life!


	3. Climate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The desert storms bring back memories. Keith reminisces while he watches the lightning roll in.

The weather in the desert is predictable. Keith has always been able to follow the patterns easily, ever since he was living out here as a kid, so it always amused him that the Garrison had all sorts of fancy technology to predict what the week might bring. They used to have full blown broadcasts of the weather right down to the hectopascal—which might be important for an impending launch, but has never been all that vital to deciding whether or not the cadets could go outside for the day.

The summer storms have always been his favourite. Swift, violent and refreshing, they power through the desert like a light show on steroids, soaking everything to the bone before disappearing again in a matter of hours.

Keith sits on his porch, a cigarette in one hand while he watches the clouds building up on the horizon. The electricity in the air is palpable, and the puppies are on edge with it, but this is his favourite part of it all. The build up to the show, not knowing how bad it will be, how much rain he’ll get, how quickly it will pass.

He remembers taking Shiro up to the roof the first time he’d picked up on an encroaching storm. The memory is fond, and Keith grins to himself, idly scratching Puck behind the ears as he tries to nuzzle his way into Keith’s jacket.

 

_“Keith, I don’t think we should be up here. This place is out of bounds.”_

_“It’s fine. I’ve been up here heaps of times. The patrols can’t see you from down below, and even after curfew they never look.”_

_“Yeah, but it’s the_ principle _of the matter.”_

_Keith shot a bemused look over his shoulder, and stepped out onto the roof despite Shiro’s half-hearted protests. Either he’d follow or he wouldn’t, and either one was fine by Keith. He didn’t want to make Shiro feel like he was risking his record after all._

_But Shiro followed, because he was Shiro and he knew that Keith wouldn’t invite him up there if he didn’t think it was worth seeing._

_It was late in the afternoon, more humid than usual and the air was thick with a kind of tension that made the hair on the back of Keith’s neck prickle. It was the electricity in the air, he knew—that tell-tale build up that promised of a brilliant light show in an hour or so._

_They were way too high up and open to risk being out there when the storm actually hit. But that wasn’t the best part anyway. The best part was beforehand._

_“Over here.”_

_He led Shiro around one of the air-conditioning units to face the west, where the sun was low on the horizon. Clouds were building in the distance, dark and angry looking, and Keith settled down against the unit with a content hum._

_“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Shiro was still standing, brow furrowed in confusion._

_Keith patted the cement beside him. “You’ll see. Give it a minute.”_

_Shiro sat and stretched his legs out, ankles crossed. They didn’t speak. The atmosphere was heavy, and Keith let it bathe him in contentment like he hadn’t felt since he used to do this with his dad. Ever since he returned to the desert, he’d made a point of coming outside to watch the storms. Now, he wanted to share it with Shiro._

_He could sense Shiro’s growing impatience though. No, not impatience…Keith didn’t think Shiro had an impatient bone in his body. It was curiosity. He wanted to know what they were waiting for, and Keith wasn’t telling him. Keith just smirked to himself._

_He’d see soon._

_Sure enough, within ten minutes of them settling down on the roof, the sun hit the growing clouds and the sky became an incredible rainbow of colours. Reds, oranges and pinks swirled their way across the sky, bathing the two of them in an ambient glow that was rarely ever seen at any other time of the year. Keith could hear Shiro suck in a breath beside him, and he turned to watch as Shiro leaned forward with a look of awe on his face._

_The brilliant colours were offset by the dark bruises of clouds, whose underbellies were heavy with rain waiting to fall. Flashes of light danced between them, growing larger and more frequent as the clouds built up, and with those heavy purples and blacks, the sky was like something out of a painting._

_“Holy…”_

_“Cool, isn’t it?” Keith said softly. “Dad used to sit outside with me when he knew this would happen. We’d watch it together and wait for the storm.”_

_“Keith this is…incredible. I’ve never seen the desert look so colourful.”_

_Shiro was mesmerized by the sunset, and Keith was mesmerized by Shiro. He watched him with a small smile, drawing his knees up to rest his head on, while Shiro’s eyes remained fixed on the light show in the distance. He looked his age at that moment—an officer he may have been but he was still only young, and his wide eyed admiration made him look even younger. Keith’s heart skipped in his chest when he remembered that he was often the target of that same look when he jumped out of the simulator after blowing everyone out of the water._

_As soon as it appeared, the colours faded as the sun finally sank behind the murky looking storm-clouds. In place of the colours was the lightning, growing in frequency until it was an almost constant dance across the horizon, and far below, the hazy looking streak of rain could be seen._

_Shiro exhaled and sank back against the air-con unit._

_“Sure does beat a typical city sunset,” he said after a minute._

_Keith laughed. “Yeah, they sure do.”_

_Shiro glanced at him then and smiled, really smiled. It was soft and fond, and Keith could feel his face warm and his heart flutter. Part of him wanted to blurt everything out—tell Shiro how he felt, take the leap and hope he didn’t crash land. Part of him whispered to himself that even if he did get burned, the desert storm could wash it all away to nothing like it did the barren landscape._

_But the words lodged in his throat and he couldn’t make his tongue work, so they faded into nothing faster than the sunset. The moment has passed as swiftly as the storm, and Keith broke eye contact to gaze back out over the horizon._

_The smell of rain was permeating the air, and the first distant, roll of thunder reached them._

_“We should head back in,” he said quietly. “They’re pretty to watch, but those clouds could still fry us if we hang around out here.”_

_He thought he saw Shiro open his mouth to speak as he stood, but Keith slipped inside before he could get the words out._

The sky doesn’t light up tonight like it did the afternoon he took Shiro out to see it. The storm’s brewing too late in the day for that, so he’s instead watching the build-up of clouds and waiting for those first few raindrops to fall. Thunder is rolling across the sky already, lazy and slow, and the smell is sharp in the air.

Keith puts the puppies inside. They’re a little older now, but they haven’t heard a desert storm yet, and he doesn’t want them to be too frightened. Or at least, if they are frightened, he doesn’t want them to bolt into the plains and end up caught in a flash flood or something similar. There’ll be more over the coming summer months, so they’ll have time to get used to them.

They’re easy to predict, after all.

The morning is always more humid than usual. In the dry desert, humidity is rare enough as it is, so waking up in a sweat is a dead giveaway that the sky is going to crack open. As the day goes on the air grows thicker, and the wildlife hunkers down. There are no rabbits bounding through the scrub around the shack, and no lizards on the rocks. No coyotes howling, and no foxes lurking around his veggie patch. The sky is usually crystal clear until mid-afternoon, when the heavy precipitation begins to build—always over the cliffs in the distance. Within hours of the first clouds forming, the storm has come and gone, leaving everything soggy and sodden in its wake.

The other cadets had always thought him insane when he’d announce a storm later in the day. He quickly learned not to speak up when he realised no one else shared his excitement.

 

_“Cadet, this is your last warning, you hear? One more brawl and I’m pulling your enrolment.”_

_Keith clenched his fists at his side. “But sir—“_

_“No ‘buts’, Cadet. This is the third time. You should remember that it’s not just you your behaviour is affecting. If I catch so much as a whiff of any more insubordination from you, you’re done. Am I clear?”_

_Keith ground his teeth._

_“Am I_ clear _?”_

_“Yes, sir.”_

_He left the office the second he was dismissed, rubbing his sleeve over the cut on his cheek that had been left by the other cadets signet ring. A few people stopped to stare as he passed them in the hallways, but he paid them no mind. Right now he was a fuse waiting to blow, and he needed to get away from everyone before he really did ruin everything. Not just for himself either, as the Commander had not-so-candidly reminded him._

_The door to the roof opened with a bang with the force that he pushed it. It was only a little satisfying._

_Keith trudged over to the air-con and sat down facing west, staring sullenly out over the horizon. The clouds were already building, and he’d missed the sunset. That somehow made him feel even worse, and he scrubbed his sleeve across his eyes angrily._

_He was out there for only a few minutes before a voice broke his vigil._

_“I thought I’d find you out here.”_

_Keith started and glanced up. He hadn’t heard Shiro approach, but he should have known he’d come looking when he found out about the fight._

_Shiro didn’t say anything. He just sat down beside Keith, ankles crossed, waiting for Keith to break the silence._

_“How’d you know I’d be out here?”_

_Shiro shrugged with a small grin. “I could smell the rain.”_

_Keith didn’t respond, and they lapsed into silence again. The thunder was already audible, and the sky was darkening fast. It wouldn’t take long before they’d be caught in a torrential downpour. Keith kind of didn’t mind the thought._

_“What happened?”_

_Shiro’s question was so soft that Keith almost didn’t hear it, and for a second he contemplated not saying anything at all. It was stupid anyway. He didn’t want to risk Shiro being disappointed in him for getting into fights over petty shit._

_“It doesn’t matter.”_

_“Yes it does,” Shiro refuted immediately. “You haven’t fought with anyone for months. If someone set you off, you must have had a good reason.”_

_“It wasn’t. I only said there’d be a storm and that jackass didn’t believe me.”_

_The look Shiro gave him was so flat that Keith was almost embarrassed at his shitty answer. Shiro knew him better than that, and obviously Keith wasn’t telling the whole truth._

_Keith sighed heavily, shoulders sagging._

_“He insulted my Dad.”_

_He could hear the sharp intake of breath beside him, and found himself feeling just a tiny bit vindicated._

_“What happened?” Shiro asked again._

_“I said there was gonna be a storm, and he asked me how I knew, ‘cause the Garrison’s tech didn’t predict it til tomorrow. I said Dad taught me how to read the weather. He mocked me for it. Called my dad a quack. I said he wasn’t, and the jackass said I’m right, he mustn’t have been, ‘cause he gave me up. So I decked him.”_

_Shiro was quiet for a few minutes. Keith scrubbed at his face again, scowling heavily at the lightning in the distance. He almost wanted to stand out there under it and let it wash all the murky feelings away._

_“I kind of want to deck him myself,” Shiro muttered. “If anyone asks, I officially gave you stern words and reminded you about fighting. Off the record, that kid is an asshole, and I hope you gave him a shiner.”_

_Keith managed a wet laugh. “A big one.”_

_“Good.”_

_Keith felt a little better after that. They might have missed the sunset, but they stayed outside and watched the storm roll towards them until the last of the light faded away and the first few drops of rain began to fall._

 

The rain is loud when it finally arrives.

Thunder has been getting increasingly wild over the last hour, but even it has nothing on the fury of the downpour. Even out here in the middle of nowhere it roars, huge fat drops hitting the dirt and forcing the plants to bend under the weight of it.

The wind is just as wicked, kicking up Keith’s hair around him and howling with a ferocity that’s rarely seen in nicer weather. His cigarette ashes out in his hand and he shoves the stub in the ash tray before standing to move further back under the eave.

A reckless part of him wants to step out there. Wants to say ‘fuck it’ and walk right out into the open air to feel the rain on his face, heedless of the dangers it poses. Wants it to wash away everything that stains his past and fill all the little craters in his heart that are the remains of the people he’s lost.

As if to warn him of what might happen if he does, a bolt of lightning chooses that exact moment to strike the tree behind the house. The noise is absolutely deafening, and so instantaneous that Keith doesn’t have time to cover his ears. He can hear the faint screech of the puppies inside, and he abandons his vigil on the porch in favour of going to them to provide some comfort.

They’re frantic in their terror. Keith wonders what they might have been like if they had their mother here with them through the storm, but doesn’t stop to ponder too deeply in favour if picking the three of them up and moving to the futon with them.

It’s a feat now that they’re each roughly half the size of a full grown adult.

Their claws prick his shirt as they all but fall over each other to get close to him, and he soothes them with nonsense words and scratches. Nudge ends up sitting on his lap shaking terribly, and Leto buries her head behind the small of his back as though that will block everything out, while Puck has managed to commando crawl his way up to curl at Keith’s neck. He can’t help but find them adorable, even though they’re clearly fucking terrified.

The thunder begins to ease off after barely fifteen minutes. The rain continues though, as heavy and flooding as ever, and Keith winces at the thought of what’s going to become of his veggie patch. He should have harvested all of the good vegetables to preserve before the storm hit.

Rookie error.

Finally, as quickly as it all built up and sped across the sky, the rain begins to fade off as well. The puppies come out of their hiding places and Keith is able to relax against the futon, rubbing at his face tiredly. He hopes the wind hasn’t damaged the shack too much.

That thought is put on hold though, when Keith catches the unmistakeable whiff of smoke.

“Fuck.”

He sits bolt upright, sniffing the air in the hopes that he’s just imagining it.

He’s not.

_“Fuck!”_

The puppies yelp as they tumble off him at the speed he darts outside. Smoke is never, _ever_ good, even in the middle of a storm, and regardless of the dangers Keith needs to find the source _now_ and end it before it can become a wildfire.

 

_He was five years old, and sitting at the table with his father in their new little shanty, solemnly waiting for the serious lesson he’d been told he needed to understand. Their house burned down a while ago, and it was only his Dad being awake at that time that meant they could escape. Keith knew they were lucky, but he didn’t feel lucky. He’d lost all of his toys and clothes, and now they were in a tiny little shed._

_He missed his old bed. He missed the window in the ceiling that meant he could see the stars at night. He missed being able to sit really high up on the roof with his dad so they could watch the sunset together._

_“Now, Keith.”_

_Keith sat up straighter, biting on his bottom lip as his Dad took a seat beside him. He had to be strong though, even if he didn’t like their new home. His Dad always said he was counting on him to be strong._

_“You know we were very lucky to get out of our house, don’t you?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“And you know that fire is very dangerous, right?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Especially out here, where it can burn things really easily. I wanna do something with you that’s gonna make sure we stay lucky, okay?”_

_“Okay.”_

_His dad laid down a piece of paper, and an assortment of crayons. Keith watched, confused, as he picked up a black one and drew a square on the paper._

_“We’re gonna make a fire plan.”_

_“What’s a fire plan?”_

_“It’s something we keep handy just in case any wild fires come through again. They burn things up real fast when it’s been dry, even in a thunderstorm, so you gotta know what to do if one breaks out right? Are you with me, son?”_

_Keith nodded._

_“Okay, so this square here, this is our house. And over here is the tree your swing is in, see?”_

_They sat and made a fire plan together, what to do if something ever went up in flames around them. What to grab, where to go, how to tell which direction it was burning. And most importantly, how to get away. The fire plan was stuck to the fridge from then on, for Keith to memorise whenever his father quizzed him on it. Because his dad always told him fire was one of the most dangerous things the weather could do, and they had to be prepared for it._

_When he was removed from the shack at seven years old, he took the fire plan with him, because fire was the most dangerous thing, and if he had the plan with him then he would be prepared for anything._

The tree is on fire.

The fucking tree that’s been struck by lightning is on fire, and it’s so damn dry inside the bark that not even the downpour has been able to stamp it out.

It hasn’t immediately ignited everything around it thanks to the rain, but if he doesn’t ensure it’s properly out it will spark again and he can kiss everything he’s built here goodbye.

Swearing profusely, Keith darts inside and grabs the metal tub he sometimes bathes the puppies in. He shoves it under the bore pump to fill, keeping his eyes on the tree the entire time. The flames look contained at the moment, but all it will take is one wrong spark for the entire thing to go up, and he knows all too well that one thunderstorm isn’t enough to douse a bushfire.

Once the tub is full he lugs it over to the tree and, ignoring the way the thick smoke burns his eyes, dumps the entire contents over the burning trunk. The flames hiss and spit, and they recede a little under the cascade, but don’t entirely go out. So Keith drags the tub back to the pump and fills it again, repeating the process once more.

It takes three goes for the flames to douse completely, and Keith dumps two more tubs full of water on it just in case.

When he’s satisfied that the flames are well and truly dead, he takes a second to lean over with his hands on his knees and wheeze out his relief. It’s a scare at most, but it’s still a very real, very stark reminder of what the weather is capable of out here.

The tree is going to have an ugly scar marring its trunk for the rest of its life as proof.

 

The storm passes and the next day the air is crisp and clean. He loves the aftermath just as much as he does the onset, because everything feels fresh, like the earth just got a good scrubbing from Mother Nature.

He needs to go and check on his vegetables, and salvage the ones he can that survived the wind and rain.

But first, he takes some paper and sits down at the table, casting his mind back to his five year old self.

First, he needs to make a fire plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent ages trying to look up what thunderstorms in the american desert were like, but google kept directing me to articles about the gulf war. so i gave up and wrote a thunderstorm as it happens in buttfuck nowhere, australia. 
> 
> this chapter is also a big ol' shout out to [the song the fic is named after.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML9h3I5Uktw)


	4. Scouting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith is on the hunt, and answers aren’t exactly forthcoming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I interpreted this one a little less literally than I have the previous prompts, mostly because I have a direction I’m drawing all of these chapters in. So have Keith scouting for answers :)

The urge never stops niggling him.

Every second of every day, it’s there. It motivated him to clean the shack and build his vegetable garden when he first arrived, and it guided him out to the coyote puppies after their mother was killed barely three weeks later. It guided him through raising them, and whispered to him to wander out into the cliffs to explore, until he’s become proficient in reading the sky and the land to mark out his location like a tracker of generations past.

As the days pass, it only gets stronger.

 

When Keith first arrived at the shack, most of his exploring was done by memory. But as he’s ventured further and further out, and his radius has grown increasingly longer, he realises pretty quickly that he’s going to have to make a map, or at least figure out some way of learning how to remember his location.

The last thing he needs is to become lost in the desert after all. It’s not like anyone is going to come out to find him.

No, he has to be smart about his explorations, and minimise the risk of becoming lost. Particularly among the high cliffs and rocky hills where it’s easy to become disoriented. The puppies are still relying on him for food after all, being not quite old enough to hunt yet. He can’t let them down like that.

The longer he’s out in the wilds, the easier it is to navigate. But he still slowly builds himself a map of the region, which is by no means to scale and kind of lumpy looking. but clear enough for him to figure out where he is at any given time.

His first map is barely more than a series of notes jotted down on some paper, where he writes various landmarks and points of interest in the landscape. When he almost becomes lost anyway, he decides to set out physical markers for himself to follow; little more than ribbons and scraps of old material tied to jutting tree roots or stubby rocks, and he’s able to collect them on the way back home. They help remind him where he’s been if he somehow doubles back, and help to guide him into places he may not have seen before.

It’s a slow process, but it works, and over the course of his time since arriving at the shack he’s managed to put together a rather messy, lopsided looking view of the landscape. It’s accurate enough for him that he doesn’t get lost when he’s using it to explore, but he’s pretty sure that any master cartographer would look at it and weep.

The larger map is transcribed down to a smaller one, with even more blank space surrounding as Keith’s explorations widen.

Most of the time he takes the hoverbike. It’s versatile, quick and manoeuvrable enough that he can get into the places he wants to without too much trouble. The rest of the time he’s relying on his own two legs, with which he climbs, crawls, scoots and edges his way through every single obstacle he finds.

The urge seems to grow the further west he goes.

It’s weird—like a kind of energy thrumming under his veins, urging him onwards no matter how far away from home he is. He isn’t sure what to make of it, and for a while he tries to resist in the hope that it will fade on its own.

But when he starts having dreams of the terrain to the west, he decides he needs to get out there.

 

The first time he comes across the cave paintings, Keith thinks he’s discovered some kind of indigenous sacred site that he’s desecrating by complete accident.

He’s been following the compulsion like clockwork, gradually heading further and further away from the shack until he has to bring camping gear because he doesn’t make it back in time for nightfall. The summer storms make his adventures a little sporadic, but he perseveres regardless, and finds himself rewarded late one afternoon when, dusty and weary, he stumbles into a cave utterly riddled with carvings and drawings.

Keith stares, struck dumb by what he’s seeing.

It’s only one, and it’s small. But it’s still nothing like anything else out here that Keith has seen before on his adventures.

The carving depicts a group of what looks like people, surrounding a huge, vaguely feline looking thing. They’re holding what he thinks are spears, so maybe it’s a depiction of a god or a ritual of some kind, but without anything else to go by he really can’t be sure. It seems to carry the same archaic style reminiscent of hieroglyphs or indigenous art, though their subject matter couldn’t be further from what he’s found here.

Keith likes to think he’s pretty well versed in history, but he can’t make heads or tails of what he’s seeing. Only that its significant, and that the urge in the back of his head is satiated just a tiny bit for the first time since he started exploring.

Particularly when the carvings become more frequent the further he goes.

 

He hasn’t been this far out before. The cliffs are tall, their canyons deep and riddled with small caves and grottos in the cliffs. His map has gotten utterly enormous, spanning multiple sheets of paper across his pinboard in the shack, and even the tiny one he’s brought with him is so crammed with information that it’s difficult to read.

Two days after finding the first carving, Keith had gone and invested in a small, cheap polaroid camera. It had cost him the little radio he’d bought not long after moving back to the shack, but it was a small price compared to the pictures and growing collection of evidence he’s gathering.

He takes photos of everything, which incidentally also helps with his navigation. Everywhere he’s explored, particularly the carvings, has a snap taken of it to pin to the board, and it’s gradually becoming increasingly clear that the carvings are all centred around one particular area of the desert.

So Keith resolves himself to explore that area more and more.

It’s with this resolve in mind that he finds himself in a collection of caves with the largest number of carvings he’s ever seen. The feline motif is more frequent here than ever, as is more carvings and paintings of people. There are also what look like carvings of some of the desert animals, and as Keith snaps pictures of them all, he realises that there’s a very high chance they could be telling a story.

It’s a staggering realisation. He has to stand in front of one of the carvings for a moment just staring at it to regather his thoughts when it hits him, and it begins to dawn on him just how big this discovery could be.

He could be looking at a completely unknown group of people, whose culture is documented here since what could be centuries. He could be looking at ancient stories that no one else has ever laid eyes on before.

Figure the story out…

The thought is simultaneously his own and somehow not, and Keith has to spin around for a moment to reassure himself that he’s the only one here. When he’s satisfied that he is though, he turns back to the carvings on the roof and takes a deep breath.

Figure out the story, huh?

He can do that, he thinks.

 

He starts by doubling back to the very first carving he’d ever found.

It’s simple. One feline, with people surrounding it. Keith takes pictures of everything, including the surrounding bare cave walls, and pins all of the photos to his pinboard with a red string indicating its location on his haphazard map.

From there, he works his way around through every single cave, collecting his evidence and scouting out newer places he might have missed, amassing a huge portfolio that doesn’t entirely fit on the pinboard but is still stored carefully to preserve them.

He doesn’t stop until he’s returned to the cavern full of carvings—enough to litter nearly every surface, and it’s only after he’s finished documenting those pictures that he realises the area he’s covered is almost twenty square miles. The amount of pictures he’s collected across that time numbers in the several hundreds.

 

Once he’s collected all of those pictures, Keith’s next point of focus is origins.

None of his or his dads books have anything like them in it, so he takes himself down to the library for a little study session, hoping that there might be something in the historical sections there he can peruse.

He finds books on all sorts of different things. Cultures, time periods, specific styles of art, cave art in general, the history of the desert. So much stuff to trawl through that he almost balks at it all, but that unwavering urge whispers for him to discover the story, so he perseveres.

The people in the library are a little wary of him at first. The town is only small, and he supposes he’s known as the half wild teenager living off the map around the place. His blunt attitude and general unwillingness to engage doesn’t do him much favours, but he finds he doesn’t care much. He has other things to focus on besides their opinions of him, and besides, it’s not like he’s doing any of them any harm.

So he sits at one of the tables with his pile of books, his squashed map and his notes, and tries his best to figure out an origin story for the carvings.

It’s slow going at best. He has no point of reference, no place to start which might help guide him in the right direction, so he has to skim his way through books on art, history and the desert and hope that he comes up with a lead. It’s frustrating, because no matter where he goes or what he tries, he can’t seem to find a solid lead.

After a week of gnawing on the ends of pencils in the library while flipping through what feels like every art or history book in the area, Keith gives up.

Not altogether; he’s too invested for that, and the whisper in his mind tells him he needs to keep going anyway. But the library search is fruitless. Without a bigger database, he isn’t going to gain any traction. The library, as nice as it is and as kind as the librarian has been since she grew used to his presence, is simply too small.

A tiny part of his mind suggests that he can go to the Garrison and ask for their help. They have some of the biggest collections of historical and scientific records after all—there’s every chance they have information on the desert the base calls home and it’s surrounding area.

He’s tempted at first. Really tempted. He wants answers, and they might have them, so it would be madness not to, right?

But then the words pilot error cross his mind, and the thought is viciously rejected.

The Garrison might have answers. But their integrity is tainted, and Keith no longer trusts them as far as he could spit. For all he knows, they could go ahead and claim one of the commanders painted the carvings themselves just to keep anyone from asking any more questions.

No, Keith will figure this one out alone.

 

The futon wheezes under his weight when he flops down on it with a dejected sigh. Nudge jumps up beside him and curls up against his leg, and he scratches behind her ears idly while he stares up at the pin board.

It’s a mess of pictures, notes and string, the large map he’s been slowly adding to since he first started exploring the centrepoint of it all. He’s scribbled little dot points on that too—points of interest, areas where the urge he feels in his head grows stronger, particular landmarks in the area. The whole task is consuming him, and even after all this time he still has no fucking answers.

It’s driving him insane.

That urge doesn’t go away. Not ever. It feels more like static electricity at this point; prickling the back of his neck insistently until he comes across the right charge and zaps himself on impact.

No matter how hard he searches though, he just can’t seem to find that charge.

“What am I gonna do, Nudge?” He asks the dosing coyote wearily. She just flicks an ear against his idling hand.

Keith snorts.

“Yeah. I feel the same.”

 

He’s been searching the desert carvings for a month when he finally discovers the pattern.

It's on complete accident, when he’s rearranging the pictures on the pin board so he can better see everything he deems relevant. He’s known the carvings increase the further west he goes, but he’s never quite understood the manner in which they do so—they’ve always seemed random and sporadic. But he’s tiredly pinning a picture of the feline motif to one of the pictures of he landmarks when it clicks.

They’re sporadic not because there isn’t a pattern to them. It’s because that’s just how Keith has discovered them. And because he’s discovered them in random patches, he’s subconsciously allowed himself to think that that must be the correct, linear story they’re trying to tell.

“It’s a spiral,” he breathes. His only response is for Puck to pause in his chewing of a rabbit bone to look up at him before going back to his gnawing. “Puck,” Keith says with building excitement. “It’s a spiral!”

What follows is a frantic and only marginally coordinated effort to lay out all of the pictures and their respective locations on the map. As he studies them one by one, the pattern becomes even clearer and more obvious, and he almost kicks himself for not realising it sooner.

He grabs the ratty, beat up exercise book he’s been writing his notes in since he began his search, and sits in front of the pin board with new focus, attention hyperfixated. New notes are jotted down and new theories, and even though he has absolutely no idea of the origins or culture of the carvings, the story they’re telling becomes increasingly clear.

The feline is some kind of god, he‘a certain of that now. At least, it seems to be an extremely important aspect of the carvings. That much had been obvious from when he first found them given the fact that it’s the focus of a lot of them, but it’s even clearer when he follows the spiral.

It’s a lion. Keith decides that without even really thinking it, and he wonders briefly why he chooses lion. It doesn’t look anything like what he’d associate to a lion—it has no mane, and there are distinctly angular additions to it that make him think of robots. But when he looks at it, something in his mind unequivocally decides that lion is correct, so a lion is what it is.

It’s also blue. In every single carving, various shades of blue are shattered across it or around it, and sometimes the motif itself is painted entirely blue.

A blue lion.

Keith is stumped.

There are no lions in this desert. Well, if there are, he’s never seen one, and he’s pretty sure he’d remember a blue one lurking around the cliffs. Maybe they existed back when these carvings were made? Or perhaps it’s a simple symbolic thing, like the Rainbow Serpent he’s read about in a few of the ancient cave books.

Either way, the lion is the central focus, and the story is bizarre.

It suggests some kind of ‘arrival’. That’s about as much as he can gather out of what he’s got. He can’t figure out whether it’s a literal ‘arrival’, or whether it’s kind of like the old Christian idea; the belief of someone returning and waiting forever until it happens. There’s no real way to know, and everything he has right now is subjectively based on his own interpretations anyway. He could be utterly dead wrong.

Regardless of the accuracy of his interpretation, this is the biggest discovery Keith has made since he first found the carvings, and he can’t quite contain his excitement at the fact. There are still patches in the story—gaps in the spiral in the areas he realises he hasn’t fully explored—but it’s a story, and Keith intends to keep looking until he’s certain.

He thinks, following this spiral of carvings and pictures and landmarks, that he’s figured out where the source of the urge is coming from.

No, not urge.

Energy.

The energy source. The thing that’s calling to him, and has been since the day he got here. That he’s mistaken so far for loneliness and grief and a desire to keep busy. It’s dragged him out into the wilderness and kept him going until he’s slowly but surely discovered the pieces and put them together. It’s in the centre of that spiral, where he hasn’t really properly explored yet.

He draws a huge, obnoxious circle on his lap, highlighting that area of the desert in big black texta.

You can go to the Garrison with this.

The second that thought crosses his mind again he rejects it with a vehemence that borders on the violent.

The Garrison doesn’t deserve this knowledge.

Keith will keep it in his clutches until he’s sure.

Until he knows what the source is and why it calls to him, and until he can figure out the meaning of the arrival the carvings are telling him about.

He won’t risk anyone else ruining his new purpose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s going to be a slight delay on the next few updates. I’m out of town for my nieces baptism, and I wrote half of this on my phone in an effort to get it posted on time. It was an agonising experience. I don’t know what the formatting is like, so hopefully it hasn’t borked and gotten stupid. Apologies if any mistakes show up. 
> 
> People who write whole fics and chapters on their phones regularly are Gods and should be feared.


	5. Rest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith reflects on his time with Shiro.

He’s been in the desert for eight months.

It’s a startling realisation, one that Keith comes to late one afternoon when he’s considering the change in the weather. It’s cooler during the day now, the temperature sitting steady at a comfortable level, and it’s that knowledge which drives him to head into the township to find a definite month of the year.

When he does, he’s shocked, though he doesn’t think he should be. Shiro went missing five months into the mission. Keith left the garrison barely two weeks later.

The coyotes are evidence enough of how much time has passed. They’re almost fully grown, and heading out into the desert of their own accord regularly. Keith doesn’t think they’ve found mates yet, but he’s pretty sure the time will come soon when they leave entirely to start their families.

He’s been readying himself for that day since the day he found them.

But the hard knowledge that he’s been without Shiro for only thirteen months in total instead of what feels like a life time is a difficult pill to swallow.  It’s forever, but somehow also not, because time has simply flown at a rate of knots and all he’s done in that period is go cave hunting and raise some wild dogs. He feels like he should have either done much, much more, or done far less.  His birthday has even come and gone without him realising, meaning Keith turned eighteen with about as much fanfare as every other birthday in his life.

That day is the first time that Keith goes into the tiny liquor store and buys himself a bottle of spirits.

He sits by the fire that night, because it’s cold enough now to keep it roaring at all hours, drinking away a renewed grief and reminiscing about the past.

Shiro had only appeared in Keith’s life when he was fourteen. They’d really only known each other for three years before the Kerberos launch, but it feels like so much longer to Keith, because aside from the brief period of happiness he’d had living in with his Dad, his life has never been anything worth writing home about.

He still remembers it so clearly that it chokes the back of his throat when he thinks about it.

 

_“Alright team, we have a visitor today who’s come across to have a chat with you about what he does for a living. It’s relevant to your science subject, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to ask him some questions.”_

_Keith slouched in his seat, interest already waning before the teacher had even introduced the newcomer. It was probably some old nerd from the observatory up north who was more focused on the order of the slideshow than he was giving kids a lesson in space, and he really had no desire to be subjected to that for forty minutes._

_The space component of their science subject was interesting, sure. Keith loved space and always had. His Dad had instilled a love for the stars in him since birth, and he’d dreamed of touching them when he was younger._

_But it was hard to keep that dream alive when the nuns at the home kept insisting he had his head in the clouds and there was no way he’d ever amount to anything._

_He stopped asking about the stars after that._

_“So class, I’d like to introduce you to Mister Takashi Shirogane from the Galaxy Garrison.”_

_There was a brief smattering of applause through the class, but that didn’t seem to dampen the spirits of the sunny looking, well dressed guy at the front of the room. The teacher beamed at him and held a hand out as if inviting him to take the stand, and he nodded to her in thanks._

_“Takashi, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is you do?”_

_“Thank you. Just Shiro is fine, by the way. Only my grandpa calls me Takashi, and that’s when I’m in trouble.”_

_A few kids laughed, but most just sat there waiting for him to continue. Shiro, to his credit, wasn’t at all perturbed by the lukewarm response. In fact, he seemed well used to it and grinned brightly at the students after his bad joke as though they’d all lost their shit in hysterics._

A recruiter, _Keith thought to himself with disdain._

_It was a common tactic of state run schools like this. Get the recruiters in; have them talk the ears off the students, get as many as they could to enlist. Give the poor, good-for-nothings from the backwater ditches of nowhere a chance to have a life outside of crime, homelessness or halfway-houses. Whip them into shape with a bit of good old fashioned discipline and routine, because that’s exactly what every troubled kid needed in their life._

_Keith turned to stare out the window, mind already elsewhere. He liked space, but he wasn’t interested in hearing promotional talks about a military academy that_ sometimes _ventured into the atmosphere._

_He stayed that way for most of the talk, daydreaming idly and tuning out almost everything the recruiter said. There were a few comments about Pluto, and some of the other kids were keenly asking where the dotted line was to sign away their lives, but mostly he just sat and ignored it all._

_If he was destined to go to space, he’d find his own way there._

“I’ll find my own way there,” Keith drawls at the fire. He’s a quarter of a bottle of bourbon down and feeling the buzz, and he laughs sardonically at himself and his own arrogance. “I never told you that one, did I Shiro? I’ll _find my own way there_. Like I was some kinda fuckin’ genius who’d build his own space ship.”

He’s pretty sure that if anyone else had lived with him over the past eight months, they’d have him committed to an institution. It’s not often that he talks to himself, but sometimes things just get so damn lonely out here that he can’t help it. He talks to Shiro’s ghost like he’s right beside him, listening to his every word. He talks to his father too sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly beat down and missing his guidance more than ever.

Except he can go and visit his father, any time he wants. He’s buried in the town after all. Shiro has no grave. He probably never will.

Even if he did, Keith wouldn’t visit it. Just like he never sees his father’s.

Of all the things that overwhelm him too much for him to function properly, staring at a headstone with his dads name on it is one unassailable guarantee.

In a way, he’s almost thankful there was nothing of Shiro to bury. Keith hates to think of him being contained in a casket in the ground, never to touch the stars again. At least up there, wherever he might be, he’s among the nebulas and comets of the universe he loved so much.

“Fuck,” Keith laughs, wiping away a stray wet spot under his eye. “The only reason you ever caught my interest was because you stayed behind. Should thank my dad for that one. Still doing me favours even long after he was gone.”

_It was nearing sunset by the time Keith was finally allowed out of the school. Detention again, this time for smacking a kid in the mouth who tried to get smart with him about his living arrangements. Wasn’t like he started it, but Keith certainly had every intention of finishing it._

_He trudged out of the school with his backpack slung over one shoulder, scowl fixed heavily on his face. He’d be hearing it from Matron this time, probably. She’d already warned him several times about getting into fights, and made threats to take his bike off him if he kept at it. Didn’t matter how many times he tried to explain to her that he never started them, she still was of the opinion that he should just turn away and ignore the snide remarks thrown at him._

_‘Just like Jesus did,’ she’d say._

_Yeah. Fat lot of good that ever did Jesus._

_Keith was almost on top of his hoverbike when he realised there was someone else by it._

_It was the recruiter. Shiro, he’d said his name was. Except he wasn’t in his stuffy, starched uniform anymore, and he was admiring the fuselage with open appreciation rather than the formal air he carried himself earlier._

_“Oh!” He straightened when he realised Keith was standing there, frowning up at him. “Sorry, was just checking it out. This yours?”_

_“Yes,” Keith grunted._

_Shiro cocked his head, not at all put off by the attitude. “Aren’t you a bit young?”_

_“I’m fourteen,” Keith hissed. “And I have an Exemption Permit.”_

_Shiro just nodded. He didn’t ask questions about that, for which Keith was quietly grateful. He hated having to explain why he was allowed to ferry himself around despite being a year below the age limit of usual permits._

_“Sorry. It’s just a really nice bike. Where’d you get it?”_

_“It was my Dads.”_

_Again, Shiro didn’t ask. Just nodded again, and ran a hand appreciatively around the rim of one of the thrusters._

_“Do you get a chance to take her out for a real spin much?”_

_Keith shrugged._

_“What kind of speeds can it get to? The ones up at the Garrison max out at one-eighty. Nowhere near fast enough, if you ask me.”_

_That finally piqued Keith’s interest. He thrust his chin out in pride, drawing himself up like it made one iota of difference to his scrawny frame._

_“Two-forty.”_

_Shiro whistled. “You’ve hit that before?”_

_Keith nodded, and Shiro grinned. A real, genuine smile._

_“I’m Shiro, by the way.”_

_“I know. You were in my class scouting for suckers.”_

_To his credit, Shiro just laughed. “Sorry, I know you already know my name, but I like to introduce myself properly anyway. And you’re clearly not one of those suckers, seeing as I don’t remember you writing your name down.”_

_“I’m not signing my life off to some academy that wants to pretend it does anything meaningful when it comes to space travel.”_

_Shiro’s lip quirked, and he leaned against the wing of Keith’s bike, smirking down at him with a glint in his eye._

_“You didn’t listen to any of it, did you?”_

_“No.”_

_“Do you know what the Galaxy Garrison is?”_

_“School for suckers.”_

_Shiro laughed again. Despite Keith’s cantankerous attitude, he wasn’t at all concerned that he was unwelcome, and he clearly wasn’t bothered by the less than enthusiastic responses he was garnering._

_“I suppose, if you want to think about it that way. But those suckers have been in space four times this year alone. I spent three months on the space station at the beginning of the year, and I’m in training for a moon expedition next year. We’ve ventured out as far as Neptune, but I’m not trained for that yet. Still got a couple of years before I can go that far.”_

_“How old are you?” Keith asked, and it was with open curiosity that time._

_“Nineteen,” Shiro replied easily._

_“And you’ve been in space?”_

_“Four times. First was when I was sixteen. Why? I thought space was for suckers.”_

_It was teasing; gentle and with a smile so that Keith didn’t bristle like he might have any other time. He just stared at Shiro then, feeling something in his chest begin to burn with a tiny, weak flicker._

_“I’ve always wanted to go to space.” Keith immediately flushed after those words escaped him. He’d blurted them out before he could get a hold of himself, and now he was going to be laughed at again for it. With a frown, he looked away, not wanting to see the look of mirth on Shiro’s face when he told him it was impossible._

_“Well, why don’t you?”_

_Keith turned back, surprised by the curious question. Shiro was looking at him with raised brows, furrowed like he didn’t understand why Keith couldn’t possibly travel among the stars. Keith was inclined to lie—to just say he was too blind to pilot or something, but something about the honest way Shiro was regarding him gave him pause. Like he really did want to know, and wasn’t just asking out of morbid curiosity for details about Keith’s shitty life story._

_“I was always told I wasn’t smart enough to get there,” Keith finally said. “And that it was futile anyway because no one around here goes to space. I can’t afford to travel away for college.”_

_“You could,” Shiro said immediately. “Your teacher pointed you out to me today. That’s not why I came by looking at this, by the way,” he gestured at the bike, effectively killing the notion that he’d only loitered to corner Keith after class. “I really do like the bike. But she told me your reports and said you were a good candidate if you were interested. I was hoping you’d come see me, but you didn’t.”_

_Keith shrugged, drawing one arm up across his chest to rub at the opposite elbow. “I don’t trust recruiters.”_

_“I can understand that.”_

_Keith gave him a look as if to say ‘really?’, and Shiro held his hands out in a placating gesture._

_“Truly, I can. They used to come to my school all the time too. Truth is, I’m only doing this job because it’s part of my duties as a junior officer. If I didn’t have to I wouldn’t, because I honestly believe people should be coming to us out of genuine interest of the program and not because they’ve been caught up listening to some clever marketing. Don’t tell my commanding officer I said that.”_

_Keith couldn’t help it. He laughed weakly, both startled and amused by the revelation Shiro was giving him. Shiro brightened at having gotten a reaction from Keith other than ‘surly’, and smiled at him again._

_“That why you changed out of your uniform?” Keith asked._

_“Partly,” Shiro replied with a conspiratorial grin. “But also because the collar on that thing is so starched that I can hardly breathe. It needs a few more runs through the dryer before it’ll be comfortable enough to wear.”_

_They sat in silence for a few minutes then. Keith stared at Shiro, unashamed and blatant, and Shiro just stared out across the desert in the distance, a small grin on his face. He was only a few years older than Keith, but he’d already been to space, more times than Keith had previously dreamed possible. And he came from a school that was nearby to boot._

_Suddenly, the stars didn’t seem so far out of reach._

_“How…how do I get in?” Keith asked tentatively. “To the Garrison, I mean. I want to fly.”_

_Shiro turned to him and beamed._

 

“And then you got me a fuckin’ sklol…skull…a fuckin’. _Scholarship_ , you rat bastard,” Keith slurs at the moon. “Guarantor and everythin’. The fuck is up with that? Who does that for a shitty kid they jus’ met? Only Shiro, thass who. Fuck.”

He hiccups, scrubbing at his eyes again while he sways on the log he’s perched himself on. Without caring about the state of his back tomorrow, he slides off it and sits on the ground, using the log as a back rest. The half empty bottle of bourbon is plonked resolutely on the ground beside him.

He hadn’t ever been a good kid either. Early on, Shiro had warned him about that. He couldn’t fight like he did at the school, because it was Shiro’s reputation on the line as well, and he couldn’t skip class. He couldn’t take off into the desert when he felt like it like he did at the home, and he had to follow the rules as expected or else risk being expelled altogether.

It had been rough at first, when he joined the year he turned fifteen. But he had Shiro to lean on back then, and Shiro had quickly become Keith’s closest and best friend. He’d never cared about the age difference himself, nor the disparity in their rank, and it seemed like Shiro didn’t either. Keith was introduced to Shiro’s best friend Matt, and the three of them became a trio of record breakers at the Garrison. They were the happiest years of Keith’s life.

“And then you had to…had’t’go’n…fuckin sign up for the _mission_ ,” Keith spits it like it’s poison. Because it is. Kerberos is the poison that ruined everything; that took Shiro and Matt, and never gave them back. Shiro had been so excited about it that he couldn’t contain himself and blurted the secret to Keith months before he was legally allowed to, and Keith had realised a whole lot of things at once.

“And I had to go’n catch _feelings_ ,” Keith adds, the word equally as venomous. “Fuck.”

His eyes burn.

 

_“Kerberos?”_

_“Yes,” Shiro whispered, like they could be overheard from the confines of his room. “I’ve been accepted as the pilot. Keith, I’m gonna fly to Kerberos!”_

_“That’s amazing!” Keith replied, genuinely, utterly stoked for him. “That’s the furthest anyone has ever travelled before. Shiro, this is incredible!”_

_“I know,” Shiro said. He was the picture of happiness, barely able to keep his joy contained and almost bouncing up and down where he sat. “I can’t believe it. It’s still six months away before the launch and I have a_ lot _of specialised training to do in that time. Man, I couldn’t keep it a secret until the announcement—I had to tell you! But I kind of signed an N.D.A, so you you’re not allowed to breathe a word.”_

_“Cross my heart,” Keith grinned. “No one is going to know until it’s announced.”_

_Shiro dragged his hands down his face, the picture of someone whose dreams were coming true and they were only just realising it. He was barely a senior officer, only three months post graduating, and he was being given what could really amount to the highest honour a pilot could receive in this place._

_To Keith, he was perfect._

_The awe Shiro had given him on the day they’d met had grown, nurtured by Shiro’s personality and mentorship, until it had become admiration, then friendship. In the last few months, it was blooming into something far more beautiful and lethal for Keith, that he’d kept clenched in his chest in an iron grip for fear that it would damage them if he let it free._

_Matt had only teased him about it once. Keith’s stricken expression must have worried him, because he’d quickly promised not to say anything about it ever again, and had promptly kept his promise. But Keith had ruminated over it after that, because if Matt had noticed his infatuation, then Shiro clearly had too, and Keith didn’t know how he felt about that._

_At least Shiro had the grace not to bring it up._

_“I’m gonna be out there, all the way out to the edge of the solar system,” Shiro said with a dreamlike air. Like he was still in disbelief. “A whole year of just. Making history. Can you believe it?”_

_Like a record scratch, Keith’s brain came to an abrupt, screeching halt._

_A whole year._

_A whole…year._

_Without Shiro. Trying to survive this place by himself, like he was any good at doing that anyway. Without Shiro’s guidance or support._

_Without Shiro._

_“Yeah,” Keith said faintly. “A whole year.”_

_Shiro picked up on the change. He turned to Keith with a furrowed brow, mouth open to question._

_“That’s really great Shiro,” Keith said before he could ask. “Honestly. I’m so happy for you. They couldn’t have picked a better pilot. I…um. I need to go and do some work for Physics though. I really wanna stay, but I should get this done so I don’t end up dropping marks…”_

_He’d bolted out the door to go and panic in peace before Shiro could really ask._

“And then you _left!_ ” Keith screams at the sky. “You _left_ , after you tol’ me to wait for you back here! You were gonna answer me when you got home, asshole! And you never came back and now I’ll never know how you felt!”

The bottle has tipped over, the last quarter spilled over in the dirt, forgotten as Keith stumbles around the fire yelling. The coyotes are howling along as though they’re joining in on some kind of call, but Keith pays them no mind. He’s too busy drowning in his drunken grief and anger to notice them right now.

“I told you how I felt about you, and you told me to _wait!_ So here I am _waiting_ , and where are you? Fuckin’ DEAD, that’s what! I don’ know how, ‘cause ‘pilot error’ is bullshit, but I been waitin’ here for OVER A YEAR for you’n you’re jus’ not even coming home! How is that fair!? HOW IS THAT FAIR, SHIRO!?”

The tirade ends in a scream of despair; a release of all of the pent up grief and agony he’s kept around him like a shroud since the day he found out about Shiro’s death. Eight months of despair, of never knowing the truth, loud enough that even wild animals in the distance howl back at him.

By the end of it Keith’s voice is raw and he’s spent, curled up on the ground weeping quietly to himself. The fire burns his face and the wintry desert chills his back, and he’s not sure which he prefers at that point, too drunk and unfeeling beyond his grief to care.

 

_“Shiro, I…I’m gonna miss you.”_

_Shiro smiled, arm around Keith’s shoulders, the shuttle looming over them both._

_“I’m gonna miss you too. But we’ll keep in touch while we’re up there, remember that. We aren’t completely cut off.”_

_Keith swallowed heavily and nodded, staring up at the spaceship. His heart was racing in his chest, and he felt infinitesimal under its shadow and the added weight of everything he wanted to say._

_He took a deep breath, and tried again._

_“Shiro…I…” He dropped his gaze to the dirt in front of his shoes, and cringed when he felt Shiro take his arm off his shoulder. Bad sign…?_

_“Keith?”_

_“I like you,” Keith blurted. Beside him, Shiro went still. “A lot. As in, I want to take you out. Go on dates with you. I want to be with you. Fuck, I had this worked out in my head…”_

_“Keith…”_

_Keith shook his head, cutting off whatever Shiro was going to say. He had to at least get all of this out before Shiro shot him down entirely. He could try, anyway._

_“Just… I’m sorry I’m dumping all of this on you now, right when you’re about to leave for a whole…fucking year. Jesus,” Keith scrubbed at his eyes and tried not to sniff, but it was obvious what he was doing. “Fuck. I just. You mean so much to me. I want you to go and have the time of your life and make history and have all of your dreams come true, but I want you to know I’ll be waiting for you when you finally land back on earth. I’m sorry if it’s not what you want, or if it’s weird or whatever, but I needed to tell you. I just want you to know that.”_

_A hand at his chin, guiding his head up as he tried to blink away the heat in his eyes. Shiro was looking at him with such softness in his expression that Keith nearly choked on a sob, and he had to drop his gaze again despite the fact that Shiro still held his jaw._

_“You’re still seventeen, Keith.”_

_“So?” Keith said, trying not to sound angry. “This isn’t some phase, if that’s what you mean. I’m not just gonna—“_

_“Wait for me,” Shiro said, silencing Keith’s protests. He brushed a thumb under Keith’s eye, wiping away the tears. “In a year when I get back, I’ll tell you then. Wait for me, okay?”_

_“I…okay…”_

“I’m waiting,” Keith whispers at the fire. He can hardly see it anymore, and he won’t remember this in the morning when he wakes up sick and dehydrated and with a vow to never touch alcohol again. He weeps silently, not caring to wipe away the tears.

“I’m waiting for you, Shiro.”

The bottle is empty, its last few drops soaking into the dirt where he kicked it over earlier. That’s where it’ll stay, as a reminder of this night.

He doesn’t rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one got away from me. a little. lmao. 
> 
> Sorry about the delay! Hope it was worth the wait!
> 
> EDIT: I forgot that alcohol laws in the US are 21+ lmfao whoOPS. looks like future america has rectified the drinking age ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Tumblr!](http://sheikofthesheikah.tumblr.com)


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